The actor as critic: an interview with Stephen Fry.

Once either dismissed as a frivolous esthete or reviled as a sexual reprobate, Oscar Wilde now seems both more 'our contemporary' than almost any other nineteenth-century man of letters and more stubbornly enigmatic than ever. Wilde was, above all, a lover of paradox and the fact that his life was riddled by a number of intertwined paradoxes fuels our continuing fascination with his legacy. The playwright who redefined the contours of British theater was a patriotic Irishman and the son of a stridently anti-British mother, the bon vivant who loved to mingle among the aristocracy but who signed a petition in defense of the Haymarket anarchists, and the sexual dissident now hailed as a gay martyr but who insisted on the witness stand that his love for men was purely Platonic.

The ongoing Wilde revival has spawned a startling array of scholarly anthologies, plays (Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecency and David Hare's The Judas Kiss) and, perhaps inevitably, Brian Gilbert's reverential biopic, Wilde. Gilbert's film, a sort of Wilde for Beginners, is the most conventional of these efforts, even though this leisurely homage is not without its incidental pleasures. While Gilbert's film chronicles Wilde's affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (affectionately known as 'Bosie') with a steaminess that would have been unthinkable in the Fifties, this portrait of the artist as an epigram-spouting dandy is not radically different from the man that emerges from earlier, more sedate filmed biographies - Gregory Ratoff's Oscar Wilde (1959, starring Robert Morley) and Ken Hughes's The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960, starring Peter Finch). Wilde's soft-core homoeroticism might offend some squeamish filmgoers, but Gilbert and screenwriter Julian Mitchell fail to explain why, according to the critic and poet Richard Howard, "Wilde has become the empty space in which we inscribe our explanations, our much-altered hopes and fears of what a homosexual man is and might be." Unlike the earlier films, Gilbert and Mitchell attempt to inform audiences of Wilde's youthful achievements as well as his tragic downfall, but this hurried tour of a brief, but eventful, life will probably only confuse audience members who have not read the near-definitive Richard Ellmann biography on which it is based. Nevertheless, like the Ratoff and Hughes films, Wilde is distinguished by several brilliant performances - Jude Law's Bosie is alternately charming and infantile, while Stephen Fry's Wilde conveys the writer's warmth and compassion as well as his trademark wit.

Many critics observed that Oscar Wilde was a part that Fry was born to play, and the actor's erudition - he is something of an amateur Wilde scholar himself - certainly contributed to his empathetic portrayal. Famous in Britain for playing Jeeves in a series of hugely popular P.G. Wodehouse adaptations produced by the BBC, he is also the author of several best-selling novels (The Liar, The Hippopotamus, and, most recently, Making History). Fry's lucidity and wit were prominently on display when he recently met with Cineaste to discuss his affection for Wilde and the critical reception of Gilbert's film. - Richard Porton

Cineaste: One might as well start with the most obvious question. Why do you think there has been a resurgence of interest in Oscar Wilde at this time?

Stephen Fry: The first reason is perhaps rather banal. We're coming to Wilde's centenary. Traditionally, people look at one hundred years as a convenient time to reassess. Perhaps more importantly, as we come to the end of our own century, we're naturally looking at the strange phenomenon of what the French called the fin de siecle during the last century. As a journalistic idea, people compare the naughty 1990s with the 1890s and think, "Are we decadent?"

In addition, as we look back over the century and assess its terrors and exploded ideologies, very few of the figures that seemed so great and promising to us when we were growing up have retained their power. When I was a schoolboy, people used to hang up posters of Che Guevara as well as John Lennon - rock music, as charming as it is, seems to have lost its distinctiveness, its antibourgeois appeal. To put it vulgarly, one of the few T-shirts that has retained its integrity and allure is Wilde - an icon that a student can still put up on his wall to show a kind of affirmation of separateness. Wilde is the crown prince of Bohemia, the symbol of art and being different.

Cineaste: Opening the film with scenes of the charismatic Wilde entertaining American silver miners highlights the fact that he was, to a certain extent, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a rock star.

Fry: Yes, he's a celebrity. The narrative mode of films is to show, not to tell. You don't want to lecture and it's best to avoid voice-over. Wilde was famous before he did anything of any particular value. Punch magazine and English newspapers featured cartoons of him when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, simply because of the way he dressed and spoke, his collection of white china, and all the rest of it. He symbolized a certain kind of young man - some people found him disgusting, others found him intriguing, others found him amusing. And, of course, as you know, there's a parody of him in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Patience. I like the surprising Wild West aspect of the opening and the shot of him going down into the mine where his fear is palpable.

Cineaste: Did you look at the earlier Wilde biopics, the Robert Morley and Peter Finch films from the Fifties?

Fry: I've never seen the Robert Morley film; it never seemed to show on TV and I've never been able to get a tape of it. I saw the Finch film when it was first shown on television and remember being slightly baffled by this man being sent to prison for patting people on the head [laughs]. That's not the fault of the film, of course, that's the fault of the age. Finch's performance was very touching and James Mason was fantastic. I didn't see it after I was cast in the film; it's so easy for little tics to get into your system. You'd then have to consciously get rid of them! I also saw Stephen Rea's stage performance in Terry Eagleton's play, St. Oscar.

I'm sure that Wilde will be played again and again. Just as Cleopatra says in the Shakespeare play: "Some squeaking Cleopatra will buoy my greatness in the posture of a whore." That's an ironic thing, because it would have been a boy actor who would have said that. We'll see yet unformed Oscars and Bosies in virtual reality and holograms, in 'touch, smell, taste' TV and whatever forms we'll have until the crack of doom. For some people, he's a gay hero, for others he exemplifies the world of the 1890s. For some, he's an intellectual hero who's almost outside of time, while for others he's an Irish nationalist...

Cineaste: Or an anarchist.

Fry: Exactly. There are as many Oscars as there are points of view and he's claimed by so many. When you make a film of this kind, there's nothing to be embarrassed about in assuming that no one's ever heard of him. Of course, others will make films that are more experimental in form. When this film started, we went through all kinds of phases, trying much more avant-garde forms. There was an idea to mix Wilde's life with modern people explaining what he meant to them.

Cineaste: An idea derived from Reds?

Fry: Exactly. There's a book by Neil Bartlett called Who is that Man?, that plays around with that idea. Another idea was a sort of Play it Again, Oscar, using a modern figure who has Wilde as a kind of familiar, like the way Elvis is used in True Romance. It's good to go through these ideas when developing a film, but perhaps when you have an unconventional story to tell, a good rule of thumb is to tell it in a conventional way. When you have a conventional story to tell, perhaps then you can play around with the form.

There's so much to tell about Wilde's life that people don't know. Take a number of cabbies in London who said, "You're doing that film about Oscar Wilde, who else is in it?" I'd say that Vanessa Redgrave is playing my mother and Jennifer Ehle plays my wife. Then I'd hear, "Get out of it...He had a wife? He was 'ginger beer'" - rhyming slang for queer - "wasn't he?" I'd reply, "Yes, but it wasn't quite that simple. He didn't know that when he got married and, of course, he had two children." And they'd say, "He had two children, bloody hell." You realize that it's extremely patronizing to assume that everybody knows all about Oscar's friends and everything about Robbie Ross and all of the biographies.

Cineaste: So you weren't bothered by the fact that Wilde is essentially a biopic?

Fry: No. I have to be absolutely frank and say that, when I was a child, the biopic was just about my favorite form of entertainment - Don Ameche as Stephen Foster as well as The Jolson Story. I loved biopics, even Cornel Wilde as Chopin in A Song to Remember or Cary Grant in Night and Not Gay.

Cineaste: You seemed to have a certain trepidation about playing Wilde when you wrote your New Yorker piece chronicling the production of the film.

Fry: Yes, as much as because of this wealth of expectations from so many different quarters, from so many ghettos of the human mind, those for whom he was Irish, those for whom he was a gay icon, and so on. You felt you were going to disappoint each group. For the very aggressively gay community, it wouldn't be 'queer' enough. As Larry Kramer would say [assumes an American accent], "Where's the pumping helmet?" And from the more genteel, you expected responses like, "Do we have to have this sex?" You can't worry about that, you just have to get on with it. But when you're involved in these things, you try to do your best and not think about that. Otherwise, if you're constantly obsessed with what people think, you'd never get out of bed in the morning, let alone actually get on the set.

Cineaste: Has the film been attacked from some of these factions in England already?

Fry: No, not really - that's why I'm wondering if I'm sounding too defensive. One gay magazine in England did say, "Where is the queer Oscar?," but that was about it. I hated that; they complained that the sex was too "lyrical." I don't know what they meant - I suppose it depends on your view of Jude Law's buttocks or how they were lit.

Some people remarked on the conventionality of the narrative form. The first instinct of a writer would be to start with Wilde at a cafe in Paris as a broken man at the end of his life, have him begging from an Englishman, and then include flashbacks. Naturally, I think that's far more conventional than what we have. When I was playing this part, I always wondered if I was conveying an awareness that tragedy was imminent. Even if you read Wilde's children's stories, you'll see that there's an extraordinary doom-laden quality to a lot of them. They're really about Icarus - the arrogance of some young man going too near to the sun and tumbling. There is a constant awareness in Wilde of self-destruction - people who succeed and then bring themselves deliberately, and almost willfully, down to a crashing, humiliating catastrophe of some kind.

When people asked me, "Do you take Oscar home with you at night?," I'd say, "Which Oscar? - the Oscar at the very beginning of his career, the most brilliant student Oxford had produced, his life is in front of him with the prospect of parliament, or the Oscar in a treadmill in the prison, with dysentery and running sores, absolutely humiliated and believing that he will be basically regarded in the same light as Judas in the inner circle of hell by all literary people, never to be respected again, never to be read again." You can't talk about taking this home, it's too difficult.

Cineaste: Even if you can't take all of these Oscars home with you, critics observed that the character of Adrian in your novel, The Liar, greatly resembles Wilde.

Fry: Yes, he's Wilde-like in the sense that he's a character who's ingested somewhat immaturely, as I did and many adolescents do, the symbols of what he thinks Wilde stands for - this kind of freedom and camp. The first time we see him in the novel he's got a cane and kid gloves and a cape; he's essentially posing. When I was at school, I was not a good games player. I hated rugby and the jock mentality; it was philistine, barbaric, and horrible. You have two options really as a child in those circumstances. You either decide to be a nerd - read and creep away and not be involved and feel scared - or assume some sort of offensive attitude through whatever tools one has at one's disposal.

In my case, the only tools I had were language and wit. Hence, I borrowed the image - and iconographical world - of Wilde. It's not who you are but just a shell you borrow in order to cope. In that sense, Wilde's always been important to me, and, for most creative people, Wilde is a figure to be encountered. He's had such a massive impact, for both good and ill. He's a symbol of the fear one has growing up that society will wreak its revenge on you for daring to be different, for daring to be gay. But he's still a giant and one's on giant's shoulders when one associates oneself with Wilde.

He was never bitter; he was brought low, humiliated to the point of virtually begging on the street. But he retained his dignity; his letter to Bosie from prison, De Profundis, is an extraordinary piece of writing - its understanding, its imaginative penetration of Bosie's life. Although he's tough on Bosie, he understands him. He tells Bosie what his trouble is - its not that he's cruel or stupid. He's just not imaginative, he does not have the ability to penetrate the minds of others, to see what it's like to be someone else, which is the first quality of art that you need. That's why Bosie wasn't a great poet, that's why he brought such tragedy. All he had was hate and, as Wilde observes, hate is unique among human emotions in that it destroys everything around it except itself. And Wilde was able to look back at this episode with the kind of true dispassion that only real engagement can give you. That's the paradox of art - when you're disengaged, you can then become an artist.

Cineaste: The truth of masks?

Fry: Yes, absolutely.

Cineaste: Why do you think Wilde proceeded with his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, a decision that seems almost masochistic? And why didn't he flee the country when he actually had the opportunity?

Fry: This question will be asked again and again, and each film will have a different answer. We don't actually try and explain it and I don't think it would be right to do so. There is a speech that Wilde delivers to Robbie Ross when they're in the hotel and Bosie's showing the card saying, "Now we've got him, we can sue him." And Robbie's going, "Are you mad? He'll produce evidence." But then Wilde says, "Robbie, it's got to stop." Bosie's older brother had shot himself, partly because Queensberry had gone around making accusations about his relationship with Lord Rosebery, the foreign secretary. And Wilde had the sense that he genuinely had to protect Bosie, either from Queensberry or from himself. He was scared that he was actually going to go shoot his father, creating a much bigger scandal.

Of course, there was a sort of vanity, but not the kind of vanity that is of a piece with this whole image of Wilde as narcissistic or an arch, brittle queen who didn't understand the real world. There was a naivete about it to some extent. I don't think that he understood that the legal process was quite as frank as it was, because it wasn't reported in the papers and I don't suppose he had ever been in a courtroom before - most civilians haven't. I don't think he knew that courtrooms were places that erections and semen were talked about. These things were never talked about in polite society. It was a great shock to realize that in the subsequent trial people were giving evidence about the state of the sheets. That kind of brutal detail probably hadn't occurred to him for a minute. He must have imagined that it would be possible for him to say, "No, it's not true." And that would have been the end of it. But, because his writing was informed by the sense of self-destructiveness, its hard to know what his motivations were.

W.B. Yeats said that he didn't know why Oscar did it, nobody could say why. They all wished he hadn't to some extent, how wonderful if he could have avoided that humiliation for two years. But he also said that if Wilde had fled to France, he would not have been the Oscar that one knows. It somehow did complete his life, ex post facto it's his destiny because it happened. It was awful for him, but it gave a strange sort of shape to his life. One cannot imagine him as an elderly man of letters.

Cineaste: Because he subscribed to a cult of youth?

Fry: Yes, partly that. And partially because we can't imagine him giving talks on the radio like E.M. Forster or Bernard Shaw or becoming a tenured academic. That's, of course, due to our lack of imagination. If Bernard Shaw had died in his thirties, one would have thought of him as a golden youth, but it's hard to imagine [laughs]. I wouldn't wish on anyone two years of hard labor in a Victorian prison, but there's a kind of integrity about Wilde which becomes more confusing when one realizes that he was a real person who lied on the witness stand. He did do the equivalent of "take this cup away from me."

Cineaste: And, of course, he never acknowledged his sexual preference.

Fry: No, but, of course, the noun 'homosexual' didn't exist in the English language in those days. He talked about his 'nature' in De Profundis. He didn't say that it was a disease, and said it didn't belong to the province of morality. He recognized - not in a self-denying or self-oppressing way - that, as he put it, "as paradox came to me in the sphere of the mind or art, so perversity came to me in the sphere of life."

There was an obsession with perversity - not just sexual inversion, as it used to be called in those days - but an interest in the 'low life' of humanity. It's reminiscent of Ivy League professors who go to gay bars and get pissed, or Wittgenstein's predilection for truck drivers [laughs]. I think that Wilde recognized that in himself; he was so implacably opposed to bourgeoisification or fixity of self or fixity of moral outlook. He said, at one point in De Profundis, when he's talking about self-realization, which is the goal in life, that all other goals are external to oneself - to be a successful writer, a successful judge. People looked at the artistic life, as Wilde called it, and they looked at him in prison and thought - that's where it gets you. Wilde thoUght that it could get you to worse places. Those who want to be something that is outside themselves - like a successful grocer or a politician or a judge - will invariably become it. That is their punishment. Those who have no idea where they're going, but wish merely to realize themselves, can never know where they'll be and that is their reward. He wanted to, as we would now say, to 'grow.' The idea of a morality or a code of living that would be forever sealed was a horrible thought.

Cineaste: Given the temper of his time, his defiance of class boundaries was perhaps as transgressive as his sexual mores.

Fry: Yes, absolutely. Imagine what it's like to grow up in a world of people with enormous whiskers and black frock coats when you have glimpsed art. Tennyson was a truly great poet, but he was this patriarchal Victorian aristocrat, something like Matthew Arnold a little later. Wilde, like many adolescents, thought, "Hasn't anybody seen how revolutionary art is? Don't they know? This is not just pretty or elegant or noble, it's something much more, it cracks the world in half." That was deeply important to him.

Baudelaire was also a huge antibourgeois influence on him - he was one of the first people to write about him in English. Les Fleurs du mal was a very important text for him, and, of course, Baudelaire was put on trial for Les Fleurs du mal. Wilde said rightly that people recognized the book's poisonous beauty - that rather French mixture of roses and Catholic imagery, with its deeply disturbing obsession with harlotry and creatures of the night.

Art and life were not separate. That's one of the great things about the Ellmann biography; he was one of the first writers in English to realize that Wilde's art is not incidental to his life and that his art is not accidental as art either. He wasn't some dilettante who said, "I'll think I'll write a book now, my dears, and then we'll go out for a drink." It was deeply serious art. The Germans, French, and Italians have never had any problem in saying Wilde in the same breath with Nietzsche and Flaubert because they regarded him as one of the great nineteenth-century men of letters. Perhaps, because of what we did to him in Britain, we found it easier to think of him as this fey, posturing queen; we couldn't even look at his work.

Ellmann took Wilde on after having come off Yeats and Joyce - the two really definitive biographies of Yeats and Joyce. When he tackled Wilde, people - especially in academia went - "Huh?" Ellmann made it clear that this was the work he had been leading up to, this was the one that mattered. Joyce and Yeats had almost been practice for a biography of Wilde. Ellmann said, "Let's not look at his life as being sort of an accidental happening." Not that all of his life choices were deliberate, but he was, as the French say, un homme serieux. There was a fundamental steel behind his work, a steel based in kindness and generosity.

Cineaste: And, of course, in the film you focus on his kindness towards his wife and children.

Fry: Yes, it deeply cracked him up that he couldn't see his children, it mattered to him immensely. The idea that he was an unworthy father was deeply upsetting to him. It was almost as if he was told he was gay by the world and this is what happens. It's rather like, if you're Jewish, you don't decide you're Jewish, an anti-Semite decides you're Jewish. You could come from a Jewish family and be a complete atheist and hate Zionism, but if Hitler or the equivalent is going to kill you, you make the decision, "OK, I'm a Jew. I'm not a religious Jew or a Zionist Jew, but if I'm going to die for it, I might as well acknowledge it." That's what I feel about my Jewishness - and my gayness. He never said, "I am a homosexual." The world defined him from the moment of the trial - that's who he was. He was suddenly a noun, rather than a process - which is what people should be. That's terrible and means you're suddenly an unnatural father, because you can't simultaneously be someone who loves your wife and children and be gay. One of the tragedies of the Wilde debacle was that it redefined our idea of homosexuality completely. Before, there had been the wonderful English legal phrase, "the abominable crime of buggery." [laughs]. But now, suddenly, you could have people of the Wildean sort.

Cineaste: And, of course, there wasn't a statute prohibiting homosexuality until shortly before the Wilde trial.

Fry: Yes, fifteen years before the Wilde trial, an amendment was actually passed at about three in the morning. It was actually a law which dealt with prostitution. The law against homosexuality was just slipped in, and Wilde was caught in that. In fact, there's a very good American academic work of about twenty years ago called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition that is now a classic. It's about the whole buccaneer tradition, but shows that this idea that there's been a steady liberalization of attitudes toward homosexuality is absolute nonsense. There was just a sudden illiberalization in the late nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, there was none of this and he points to court cases where there were two men found doing something together and compares them with heterosexual "sex crimes," concluding that one is not dealt with more severely than the other. There isn't special language used by the judge about hideous, unnatural sex practices.

Cineaste: Once a name is given to homosexuality, as it were, it becomes taboo.

Fry: Exactly, absolutely right. In a way, that was the problem with Gide and the more aggressively political figures who came afterwards. They didn't help by claiming territory for themselves. And, of course, Gore Vidal is quite vehement in insisting on not being called a noun - there are homosexual acts, but not people. No one wants to be an anything. If you're Jewish, you're a Jew, if you have asthma, you're 'asthmatic.'

Cineaste: It's interesting that the film doesn't portray the Marquess of Queensberry as a total villain.

Fry: Yes, I think that's right. He was not exactly the stage Victorian melodrama villain with the curling mustache and the whip. He was a brutal man, but was rather lonely and must have felt awful that his children despised him. He was also not the straightforward Victorian aristocrat. He hated the Christian church and would write furious letters about how grotesque it was, which was quite unusual for a Victorian gentleman. He sort of believed in a God but certainly not a Christian God or a biblical God. And he did write that very strange, great poem called "When I'm Dead, Cremate Me" [laughs]. He was entirely charmed by Wilde when they first met. That scene in the film in the Cafe Royal is exactly what happened.

Cineaste: Does your awareness of the problems of being a Jew in England explain the subject of your recent novel, Making History?

Fry: I was so hurt by Michiko Kakutani's review in The New York Times, partly because it's so wrong. It's always awful when people tell you what you aspire to, as she did. And it's not a comic novel. I don't think it's particularly funny, anyway. I'm terrified, because of my family living here; all of my living relatives are Jewish except for my father.

Cineaste: Her review seemed rather literal-minded in assuming that speculative fiction could not do justice to questions raised by the Holocaust.

Fry: Yes, but it's not about the Holocaust, but about the vanity of this character who thinks that he can do something about it. It's a 'what if' book - What if Hitler's birth could have been prevented. But anyone, growing up, hears about aunt this or uncle this, and, of course, learns that Hitler killed them. Hitler is used as a demonic force, and I always used to wonder, as a child, if this person Hitler personally killed these people. Of course, you ultimately learn that it was his regime, but you do wonder. It seems a very serious and reasonable question - Would there have been no Holocaust if Hitler hadn't been born? And I don't try to explain Hitler psychologically - that's a ludicrous, daft idea. More importantly, there's the factor where humanity is left off the hook by saying that the Holocaust is explained by Hitler - because this one sperm hit this one egg.

Cineaste: How much of your subsequent success do you attribute to your participation in Footlights [the drama society at Cambridge known for its revues] with actors such as Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie?

Fry: Yeah, I never thought I'd be an actor or anything of the kind. When I got to university, I thought that I'd probably he there for the rest of my life. I thought I'd grow tweed and teach, either at Cambridge or some other university or school. Meeting Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie and the others was important; we got on well from the start. The BBC and other outlets wanted us to do television. We found ourselves with equity cards; suddenly it was three years after Cambridge and we were offered other things. After about five or ten years, I finally knew that this was going to be my career. I can't imagine it would have happened without Footlights.

Cineaste: And does Peter's Friends - in which you star with Thompson and which Branagh directed - contain some autobiographical elements?

Fry: In some respects. I have a house in the country, and a lot of friends from university do come and stay. It's not quite as grand as in the film [laughs]. Marty Bergman, who cowrote the script with Rita Rudner, was also at university with me. When Ken sent me the script, I thought, "We can't possibly do this, people will think it's the most incestuous, wanky, self-congratulatory sort of thing." And the great thing about Ken Branagh - one of the reasons he's been successful - is that he doesn't give a fuck about what other people think. Coming from Ireland, he probably finds our English tendency to apologize again and again exasperating. His attitude was, "Don't care about what some Time Out reviewer is going to say." People also compared it to The Big Chill, but Ken thought we had every right to make it, because it's part of a whole genre - reunion films like That Championship Season.

Peter's Friends was a huge success in France; I think it might have been even more popular there than in England. When I go there, people still identify me with Les Amis du Pierre. When we see French films in which bourgeois people ironize wittily about their adultery, we think it's sexy and cool. French people might find these characteristics irritating in a way that we don't. They probably see our film and aren't bothered by the milieu in the way an English person might be.

Richard Porton is the author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination, to be published by Verso in 1999